The latest edition of the Magic Online Championship Series was this weekend…except it actually wasn’t. To the surprise of approximately nobody, the event had difficulties in the early rounds (costing PT Dragon’s Maze champion Tom Martell his spot as he timed out and was dropped) before crashing completely in round 8. Beloved pro Brian Kibler was 7-0 and top of the standings at the time, and had this to say:
Kibler: I was in first place in the event and basically locked for Top 8 and MTGO crashed and now I’m out. This is my first and last MOCS.
Not to worry folks! Everyone with 15 or more match points can play in a make-up event! Unless of course you have plans next Saturday morning, like playing in GP DC or any of the myriad PTQs that are likely happening. Or, you know, having a life outside of Magic Online. Yes, the make-up event was announced to start at the same time as the only North American Legacy GP this year, which always draws a good crowd. Genius.
Of course this is hardly the first time a major online event has crashed, nor is Kibler the first high-profile player to be affected: Patrick Sullivan was 7-0 in a PTQ that crashed, Todd Anderson was in the semis and a click away from making the finals when a bug cost him his match. What might finally give the whole unacceptable situation some impetus is that Kibler has a higher profile than the others combined, and is genuinely livid.
In what has to be the most hilarious coincidence in a long time, as I wrote the above paragraph the MTGO PTQ also crashed. So for those keeping score, that’s two huge Magic Online events in one weekend, neither of which got to the end. The program might be great for drafting, playtesting and doing small events but once you start trying to link it to big paper events, things go very wrong. Perhaps it’s time to delink for a while until server stability isn’t a foreign concept.
I’ll tell you what though, I feel very sorry for people like Worth Wollpert and Mike Turian, the parts of Wizards who are public-facing and responsible for Magic Online. On a weekend, with likely nobody in the office, they are facing monumental levels of backlash and can do virtually nothing about it. The anger and disappointment from people who are affected is definitely understandable, but I would not want to be on the receiving end.
So what’s the answer when this happens? So far Wizards has tended to refund entry fees (obviously), award prizes to everyone still active in the event at the time of the crash and restart the event at a future date with some portion of the higher-ranked players being invited. Giving compensation only to those still enrolled encourages people to never drop, so that seems poor. Rescheduling an event that might have been 8 hours old means that you just wasted all that time, and if you can’t make the make-up event then you’re basically screwed.
Why doesn’t MTGO allow people to rejoin an event from which they have been dropped for timing out? Even paper events allow you to do that in certain circumstances. I’m not sure if this is currently done, but why can’t an event be restarted after a crash from the last stable point, with the same records, players, decks and so on? It might require a lot of back-end manual work, but when the prize is so huge I don’t think you get to use that excuse any more.
Enough MTGO. One thing I love about the online Magic community is how our interests tend to be very similar. Watching Twitter this week it was fun seeing all the people coming out of Thor, Ender’s Game and so on and telling me I both need to see them and need to avoid them. The non-Magic accounts I follow tend to be far less forthcoming with their opinions, which is a shame. Mostly.
On a similar note, it’s a constant source of comfort to me that there are people in this community with whom I can discuss almost anything. There was a nice basketball conversation this week between Marshall Sutcliffe, BDM, Christian Calcano and Nate Price. Cedric Phillips, Mike Flores, Big Head Joe and several others are wrestling fans. BDM, Sheldon Menery, Brainstorm Brewery’s Marcel and more are foodies. There are wine lovers, music lovers, readers and writers. And it’s great.
Following the successful returns of Huey Jensen and Chris Pikula to competitive Magic (which followed the even more successful returns of Jon Finkel and Brian Kibler), it seems like we’re seeing a large influx of returning names from Magic’s past. Ben “Benny Beatdowns” Lundquist has been having success on the SCG circuit, and Tom “The Boss” Ross is starting to follow suit with his own brand of deckbuilding. Mark Herberholz made the finals of a PTQ this past weekend (clearly not online), losing to his friend Phil Cape. If players who walked away are now coming back, the game must be doing something right.
I hear a lot of talk about how good Standard is right now because there are so many viable decks. Am I alone in not really seeing the variety? You can play Esper control, you can play Rx or Gx Aggro, you can play Devotion or you can lose. I don’t think the format is bad right now, but I don’t think it’s any more diverse than it was before rotation.
One other major discussion topic recently has been that of PTQs. Are the right people being awarded the chance to organise them? Are they getting to be too big? Is it too hard to get “on the train” now compared with before? The short answers: mostly, yes, no. Every now and then a cheapskate TO will get awarded a PTQ and do a lousy job with it, from horrible locations to shit prize support. These tend to stick out in the memory more than the ones that are fine, which leads to people thinking that the bad events are a bigger problem than they likely are.
Size is a real problem though. Sealed events are routinely breaking 200 players, and Toronto has broken 350 twice this year so far including holding the largest PTQ of all time. These events award the same number of slots (1) as the 70- and 80-player events elsewhere in the world. They award a quarter of the slots that a 500-player GP awards, and at a GP you can take advantage of byes. It’s not an argument about population density or who can get where, but perhaps it’s time to say that larger PTQs offer more slots? Or maybe they should be split at a certain point with each event giving one slot?
Getting on the train is meant to be hard. Plain and simple. There is a lot of money in being a Platinum pro, why should that sort of money be easily obtained? Playing on the Pro Tour is a privilege and one that requires work and dedication. Qualifying once should be far easier than staying there, and right now that’s the way it is. The system does work for people who are deserving: look no further than Canada’s own Alex Hayne, for example.
The interactions between Heliod, Purphoros, Elspeth and Assemble the Legion are really making me happy right now. The initial deck I built to abuse this was a little heavy on main deck creature removal but with some tweaking I think a RW control-ish deck that wins via token swarm is totally viable.
After it made a fairly anaemic showing at Eternal Weekend and the Bazaar of Moxen, True-Name Nemesis was a force at this weekend’s Legacy Open. In tandem with that well-known reasonable and fair card Stoneforge Mystic, Fish-genitus wrecked some faces in UW and Esper Stoneblade shells. As availability becomes less of an issue and tweaking shows results, we might see this guy be a serious problem in Legacy.
It’s a little shorter than normal, but thanks for following the Stream this week.
Chris is a deck brewer, podcaster and lover of bacon. He’s recently realised he isn’t completely terrible at this game.